


Jean at Dawn

by greerwatson



Category: Jean Robertson Series - Janet Sandison
Genre: Backstory, Canon-related, Gen, Historical, Scotland
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 07:55:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21133289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greerwatson/pseuds/greerwatson
Summary: Ada Bain's story.





	Jean at Dawn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fawatson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fawatson/gifts).

I must have had parents. After all I was born, and surely in the usual way. I can’t say who they were, though. I never knew my mother or father. I was just a foundling that was left on the church steps one cold night; and, as I was the first that year, they called me Ada. When I learned my letters I got the sense of their method of naming.

I lived, which most foundling bairns don’t. What I recollect of my early years is mostly slaps and cold and never enough food, for that’s the lot of children in the Foundling Home. Too many sharing beds in the dormitory; too little in the porridge bowl. Draughts and thin ugly clothes; and the scorn of the better-off pupils at the school, who had parents to care for them. If there was trouble, it was us got the strap first, last, and always; and the teachers were strict.

When I turned fourteen, I was put in service. It was a family named Simpson. The old man, Simpson himself, had a rich job in Glasgow; but their home was up the line in a place called Lochfoot. I mind being taken by the Matron to her office—which usually meant the strap, and much of the day locked in a closet with no meals—and had no idea what I'd done wrong this time. I was terrified of what was in store for me, and knew I'd “get it” whether I was guilty or no. But instead there was a fine lady in smart clothes, the like of which I’d never seen in our neighbourhood. She looked me up and down, and sniffed. Then Matron said I was clean and obedient, knew my prayers, and was a hard worker. Well, that part was true enough, for they used the girls to do the scut work, which I dare say was the best teaching we got in the place.

So that was the interview, far as it went. It was all talk between the two of them. I never said a word.

The trip to Lochfoot was the first time I’d been on a train, with its whistles and stops, and the smuts in the window. I called the lady “Miss”; and she said her name was Mrs MacTavish, and I should call her that. She was the housekeeper, she said; and then she sniffed again, and said “It’s some strange notion got in their heads to hire a girl from that Home instead of a decent agency!” I’d no idea what an “Agency” was, unless it was another word for God.

We got off at the station at the end of the line and walked up through a slum not so different from the streets in Glasgow. But we didn’t stop there, for poor folk don’t have housekeepers and maids. Instead, we passed right out of that part of the town and walked until we came to a fine big paved street I was told was “the Crescent”. I went to turn down it, to the shock of Mrs McTavish, who took me by the shoulders with a shake, saying, “Ye glaikit wee fule! That’s no’ for the likes o’ us. We go ben the back door, and dinna ye forget it.” And she took me by firmly by the hand so I couldn’t stray, and led me on. Beyond the Crescent was a dirt lane that ran behind a stone wall. Down this we walked, till finally we turned in at a garden gate, walked past some big plants higher than I was, and came out the back of an enormous house. This I was told, was where the Simpsons lived. Its name was Laurelbank.

I was to work there for some ten years.

We maids slept in the attic, in a shared room, but separate beds. Other than that, it was much like the Home: draughty all year round, hot in summer and cold in winter. The servants’ hall was off by the kitchen, with a big table round which we all sat; and, though we didn’t eat the same food as the family, there was more than I’d ever seen at the Home. I grew a couple of inches that first year I worked there, which annoyed Mrs MacTavish since I outgrew my clothes faster than I should. First she showed me how to put down the hem and let out the seams; and then she had to get a new dress for me, even though it was before the year was out. Eleven pounds annual were my wages (for Foundling girls come cheap). Plus room and board, and a new uniform—but only one per year, you understand. Dark blue dress, plain starched apron, cap, stockings: all but shoes, which were resoled as needed. I was short, even after that spurt of growth. For a while, I was scullery maid; but then I was put to cleaning the house. I never served table, though. That was Meg’s job, for she was taller and prettier. Which led to her troubles; but that came later.

One half day a fortnight I got time off; but I’d no idea what to do with it. Meg had family, and went home to see them. I’d no one, and was kept too busy to meet anyone from the other houses on the Crescent. At times, Mrs MacTavish would send me out to get some fresh air, which she said would do me good. So I learned the lay of the town; and my preference took me out away from the slums to the Village. Mind you, I never stopped when folk called after me, for I mistrusted their intentions. Friendliness is not something you learn in the Foundling Home. The houses, though, were neat and clean-looking; and you could tell that decent folk lived there. Mrs MacTavish told me the houses belonged to the Duke, and the people living in them worked at the Castle or its Home Farm. She spoke with approval of the Village, for the Castle beat the Crescent any day. Contrariwise, she had naught but scorn for those in the terraces down towards the loch, for the folk there only worked on the railway or on the trams, when they could have gone into decent service.

Besides my half-day excursions, I left Laurelbank every Sunday to walk to the church in company with the rest of the staff. The Family, of course, drove there in the carriage and had their own pew. We servants sat up in the gallery. Meg might be let chat a few minutes with her family; but Mrs MacTavish kept a close eye on us otherwise.

Barring Sundays and my half-day, my life was work. I rose at five, washed in cold water at the basin, and dressed in my uniform; then I went down to the kitchen to break my fast quickly before I took up my brushes and rags and got to work cleaning the grates and sweeping, dusting, and polishing round the house. My day had to start early for, once the Simpsons were up and about, they’d no wish to see the likes of servants at work in the Family's part of the house. Just as the cook had to have breakfast ready for them by the time they were up and dressed; so I had to be back behind the green door before they came down to eat it. For all that Mr Simpson thought it was early that he left to catch the train to the City, half my day’s work was done before I took him up his hot water to shave.

Cleaning that great house was a matter of pride to me. I _was_ a hard worker, I s’pose, as the Simpsons thought of it. Truth be told, though, I was awed by the things they owned. Never in my life had I even imagined the likes of the riches that they took as a matter of course.

They’d silver—a whole room just of things made of silver, which the butler polished himself. I went in there to dust and sweep, and saw the shine and sparkle. Matron had had a brass vase in her office which I had much admired, even as I was being punished; but Mr Hollis, the butler, told me brass was vulgar. “A gentleman like Mr Simpson wouldna have such a thing in the house,” he said, looking down his nose. If anything looked yellow-coloured, like the fancy trim on the grandfather clock, then it was gold; but dishes and the like were made out of solid silver. The brown statuettes gleaming in the dining room were bronze; and that was quality too, not vulgar like brass. I rubbed them over daily with an oily rag.

There was a great thing in the front hall that I had to dust from top to bottom (and all the joints and crannies in between, too) before I polished the tiles of the floor. It shone, and I called it a silver statuette; but Mr Hollis laughed and said, “It’d take the Duke’s own money to have that much in siller, lass. It’s no statue, neither. It’s a suit o’ armour. Used to be they’d wear such like to go to war in. ‘Knights in shining armour’, you heard of _that_, surely?”

Well, I had, actually. It was in one of the books at school, all about ancient history. Useless and boring (and boring _because_ it was useless). I’d never known it was iron clothes that gentlemen used to wear instead of a suit of barathea or tweed.

Downstairs, where the Family lived and I worked, it was always warm. There were fires burning in all the main rooms, and big feather-filled eiderdowns on the beds to keep the draughts out at night. Upstairs, we had only a blanket on the bed. In the coldest days of winter, we might be allowed a pass or two down by the foot with a warming pan; but I'd always chilblains on fingers and toes. No sharing to keep warm, either. It was vulgar to bunk in together, Mrs MacTavish told me sternly. Only poor folk shared beds (saving husband and wife, of course). In a good position like Laurelbank, it was a privilege for the servants to have their own beds. It was a cold privilege; but it did mean that I was keen to get out and up in the morning, downstairs to the warm parts of the house. So I reckon they got more work out of me that way, which was canny of them. One of my jobs was to put more coal on the fire in the front room when Mrs Simpson said it was chill in there. But none of the Family had a notion what chill really was.

There were clocks in all the downstairs rooms, and they chimed out the hours of my day, as church marked the end of the week. I paid no especial heed to the passing of the years. Life at Laurelbank seemed unchanging and unchangeable. Still, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven,” as they made us learn by heart when I was a bairn at school.

The Simpsons had two daughters, though there was quiet mention that several children had died young. There were also hushed tales in the servants’ hall of another one who’d run off years before; but Mr Hollis shut that talk up fast, for he didn't allow gossip. As for the son of the Family, he was away at a fancy school in England. Him I didn’t see till the summer after I arrived, and not much then.

It was him got Meg in trouble. Mrs MacTavish gave me a good talking to; and I had to take on most of Meg’s work till another maid was hired. One thing I took from that was the vulgarity of it all, and the certainty that _I_ would never be caught that way.

A year or two later, Charlie—the son—got in his own type of trouble. Gambled away a fortune, or so was the tale in the kitchen. Mr Hollis tried to put a stop to that gossip, too; but I overheard him talking to Mrs MacTavish, so I dare say it was the truth. For certain, all the house could hear the row in Mr Simpson’s study.

Two days later, the policeman from the town came in his brass buttons and helmet, ringing the bell as bold as you please. He had to go into the study; but what little he said at the door brought Mr Hollis down to the kitchen, all fizzing with things he wouldn’t say to us. Then he was rung for; and, when he came back from seeing Mr Simpson, we were told Charlie had drowned himself in the loch. His body’d been found that morning and carried through the town to the undertaker's; so the whole town knew the truth of it.

The scandal was terrible. “I canna face the folk at kirk,” said Mrs MacTavish, with a wry mouth. Off she went with scarcely a week’s notice. “I’ll be stayin’ wi’ my sister in Kirkintilloch,” was the last she told us. Mr Hollis waited till he’d found a new place through an agency. In their place came a slatternly woman named Tait, who moved into the housekeeper’s room with her little girl, Annie. “She's no’ quite right in the heid, that bairn,” said the new maid before she, too, took herself off. The Family’d never have hired a woman with a child if there’d been anyone else to take the job. Even I knew that.

I stayed on. You see, I’d never had to look for a new place in my life. It’d all been decided for me by Matron at the Home; and I’d no idea where to begin. So I stayed on for about a year. Then, at church one Sunday I was approached by a young man. Very tall, he was, and a nice-looking fellow. I’d a vague notion I’d seen him before; and he took off his cap politely, and introduced himself as Hughie Robertson, who lived at Lilac Cottage in the Village with his widowed mother.

If Mrs MacTavish had been still working at Laurelbank, I doubt she’d have let me speak to him. For certain, I was shy of replying. On the other hand, it’d be rude to say nothing when addressed direct like. So I gave my name.

Thus we began walking out together; and six months later he approached Mrs Simpson to declare his intentions. She called me sly; but even the likes of her approved of the Village.

So I left Laurelbank.

I learned a lot while working in that house. I learned to know what “vulgar” means. Bronze is better nor brass; polished wood beats deal; tweed lasts longer than shoddy; and fine brandy beats cheap beer or gin, though better yet is to keep sober on water. I learned the value of money, too. Those with money are warm, and those without shiver; fine ladies lounge idle while servants work; and men of business get fat, while a hungry girl is scolded. The rich always get richer; but a maid earns poor wages forever.

I’ve no wish to go back to Laurelbank as servant. But I wouldn’t mind having their money.


End file.
